I was thinking if I should fill an ebuild request at bugzilla or rather post this in the forum. Well I decided to post here, maybe there is a larger number of people interested in this here.

I recently read an article about this speech2text software Simon in a german Linux Mag, and it seems a really great piece of software!!!
Here are the links to the projekt homepage and their page on sourceforge. As far as I know it is licensed under GPLv2.
It depends on Qt 4.3 and Julius, which should need MySQL as far as I know.

Well, I was quite fascinated, because it's a free and, as it seems, a very powerful software, which allows you not only to dictate texts but also to control your machine.

As I have no experience with writing ebuilds, I just wanted to present this projekt here, and kindly ask if someone could help me out with the ebuilds needed...
That would be really great!!

Thanks so much in advance!

Greatings!!!!
- Daniel_________________""Sir! We are surrounded!" - "Excellent! We can attack in any direction!""

Possibly that's the reason - but who does not want to check if his computer may already behave like those at star trek (remember when Scotty tried to use a Mac by talking into the mouse...).

Anyway already in 2001 I was quite surprised by a speach recognising software of IBM - it worked quite well with Windoof NT/2000. However since 2003 I am a Windoof-free-zone and therefore always looking around for software similar to those I used with Windoof. This week I found an artice in the german LinuxUser about Simon and it made me curious...

If there is no ebuild, I will use the installation from the homepage (I think I am far away from writing an ebuild).

Has anyone used it? Wondering how accurate this is. I have a dual-boost desktop with Gentoo and Vista, and I've been surprised that the built-in speech recognition in Windows is halfway competant at interpreting me, and want to find something better in Linux.

I've used it and it works quiet fine.
in fact the speech recognition engine itself is julius,
simon is "just" a gui (it's a great gui, don't get me wrong) to make users life easier.
simon also has several "plugins" available, so you can make it to work f.e. with firefox quiet quickly.

There's also a xbmc plugin, which I also tried, and it also works quiet fine (could require some more training for my speech ).
unfortunately simon is not a qt4 only gui, but it uses a bunch of kdelibs, so it probably
never will make it onto my main mediacenter system.

maybe worth a try to train speech with simon on a kde system, and use that trained data with a pure julius engine on the htpc.
not sure though, if I want to setup a standalone julius again - last time some years back this wasn't too funny

>>> Installing (1 of 1) app-accessibility/julius-4.1
* This package will overwrite one or more files that may belong to other
* packages (see list below). You can use a command such as `portageq
* owners / <filename>` to identify the installed package that owns a
* file. If portageq reports that only one package owns a file then do
* NOT file a bug report. A bug report is only useful if it identifies at
* least two or more packages that are known to install the same file(s).
* If a collision occurs and you can not explain where the file came from
* then you should simply ignore the collision since there is not enough
* information to determine if a real problem exists. Please do NOT file
* a bug report at http://bugs.gentoo.org unless you report exactly which
* two packages install the same file(s). Once again, please do NOT file
* a bug report unless you have completely understood the above message.
*
* Detected file collision(s):
*
* /usr/bin/jcontrol
*
* Searching all installed packages for file collisions...
*
* Press Ctrl-C to Stop
*
* dev-java/java-config-2.1.11-r3
* /usr/bin/jcontrol
*
* Package 'app-accessibility/julius-4.1' NOT merged due to file
* collisions. If necessary, refer to your elog messages for the whole
* content of the above message.

There is a patch in the gentoo bug to rename jcontrol. I also am interested in this. I see that the latest version is 4.1.5 with bugfixes. The dependencies need updating also from the current ebuild. I'll see about updating it and installing it myself in the next few days._________________Brian
Porthole, the Portage GUI frontend irc@freenode: #gentoo-guis, #porthole, Blog
layman, gentoolkit, CoreBuilder, esearch...

HTK was sold by Entropic until 1999 when Microsoft bought Entropic. Microsoft has now licensed HTK back to CUED and is providing support so that CUED can redistribute HTK and provide development support via the HTK3 web site. While Microsoft retains the copyright to the existing HTK code, everybody is encouraged to make changes to the source code and contribute them for inclusion in HTK3.

Has anyone tried to install the new Simon-0.4.0? Obviously, it's not in portage, but I was hoping someone might have an ebuild?
Just have a look on http://simon-listens.blogspot.fr/ for a link to the source code. Apparently, in this release, HTK has become optional. However, it has some new dependencies, and I don't really know how to install it. So if anyone has an idea, I'd be interested_________________Prayer can change the world!

One of the new dependencies of Simon 0.4 is pocketsphinx. On the other hand, HTK is not required any more. This is an ebuild I've written (I'm sure it could be done more elegantly though). Put it under app-accessibility/pocketsphinx :